…As you can tell, I love data merge.…It's an incredibly powerful feature inside InDesign.…But, that said, it does have its limitations.…It just can't seem to do everything I need it to sometimes.…Fortunately, InDesign is super flexible, and extensible.…So in this chapter, I'm going to show you a…few tricks for getting the most out of data merge.…First, I'll show you a couple of special effects…that take advantage of mixing data merge with other…features in InDesign.…For example, how to customize not just the text…and pictures on your page, but the actual underlying design.…

Making it unique for each record, then I'll show you a few…in design scripts that a guy in France named Loic Aigon wrote.…These are free scripts that you can use and they take the basic data merge feature…and they build it up to do things that data merge wasn't originally built to do.…Letting you make tables, directories and even basic…catalogs or yearbooks.…Now I'm going to show you how these free scripts work, but if you want…to follow along, you're going to need to download and install the scripts yourself.…

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Author

Updated

7/2/2014

Released

2/13/2014

When faced with large amounts of information, the designer's challenge is to make it clear and easy to understand. Adobe InDesign can help. With its Data Merge command, you can take raw data from spreadsheets or databases and quickly apply formatting with an InDesign template. In this course, author David Blatner takes you through the data merge capabilities of InDesign, two example projects (name tags and a catalog), and some third-party solutions that extend InDesign's data handling power.

Topics include:

Understanding data merge

Setting up the data

Creating the template

Building a merged document

Adding images

Updating the data

Extending Data Merge

Helpful third-party plugins and scripts

Skill Level Advanced

1h 52m

Duration

189,168

Views

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Q: This course was updated on 7/02/2014. What changed?

A: We added one new movie covering QR codes. David shows you the easy way to create dozens or even hundreds of QR codes with data from sources like Excel using InDesign's Data Merge feature.